Cézanne

... as many of the inexpensive Taschen series, in terms of the quality of the reproductions. The colors seem 'heavier' than my memories of the originals, but perhaps it's all a question of scale. Cézanne is among my long-time favorite painters, and I've spent happy hours looking at his works in museums from Paris to Berlin to Tokyo to Philadelphia. I once drove from Philly to Columbus Ohio just to see one painting by Cézanne. But I didn't pick up this Taschen to refresh memories of Cézanne's paintings. I was interested in the text by Ulrike Becks-Malorny, specifically her discussion of the life-long friendship between the artist and the writer Emile Zola, which began when they were boys but which was dampened when Zola portrayed a 'struggling' painter in his novel "L'Oeuvre" in 1886. I've undertaken to read all twenty of Zola's 'Macquart-Rougon' novels in order, but I may need to jump ahead to "L'Oeuvre" because of my great love of Cézanne. The Taschen text is not enough. What is it about Cézanne's painting that make it more compelling for me than that of the other Impressionists and even post-Impressionists? It's totally subjective, I suppose, but when I look long enough at a Cézanne landscape, I feel radiantly happy. I believe once again in the solidity of things and in the capacity of my senses to 'order' reality. Madame Becks-Malorny describes Cézanne's painstakingly slow method of painting in terms of asserting 'order' through balanced composition, modifying or modulating 'what he saw' until it became 'what he really saw' as a creator.